The Empty Family

By Colm Tóibín

Book Overview

The bestselling and award-winning author of Brooklyn, Colm T ib n, returns with a stunning collection of stories--"a book that's both a perfect introduction to T ib n and, for longtime fans, a bracing pleasure" (The Seattle Times).

Critics praised Brooklyn as a "beautifully rendered portrait of Brooklyn and provincial Ireland in the 1950s." In The Empty Family, T ib n has extended his imagination further, offering an incredible range of periods and characters--people linked by love, loneliness, desire--"the unvarying dilemmas of the human heart" ( The Observer, UK).

In the breathtaking long story "The Street," T ib n imagines a relationship between Pakistani workers in Barcelona--a taboo affair in a community ruled by obedience and silence. In "Two Women," an eminent and taciturn Irish set designer takes a job in her homeland and must confront emotions she has long repressed. "Silence" is a brilliant historical set piece about Lady Gregory, who tells the writer Henry James a confessional story at a dinner party.

The Empty Family will further cement T ib n's status as "his generation's most gifted writer of love's complicated, contradictory power" ( Los Angeles Times ).

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 143919596X
• ISBN13: 9781439195963
• Release Date: January 2012
• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.57 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.3" x 8.0"